[Bug 2262] [xqueryx] 0-ary function arguments

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=2262





------- Additional Comments From davidc@nag.co.uk  2005-09-28 14:47 -------
Actually I'd fix the other examples as well. But they are not so serious.
A query has at most one prolog so having two ways there does not cause serious
exponential blow up in the number of ways an expression can be encoded.

Currently every 0-ary function has two ways of being encoded (with or without
xqx:arguments) and every 1-ary function has two ways of being encoded (with
functioncall or constructorfunction)  thus a typical query with half a dozen
such functions can be encoded in 64 ways.  One would expect that a benefit of an
xml encoding is that it is nearer to the abstract syntax tree and abstracts away
many syntactic differences that one finds in a text encoding, which should make
the xml encoded version more amenable to analysis and transformation. These
encoding variations mean that XqueryX is looking like it will have _more_
syntactic variation than the xquery form, which is somewhat strange.

I don't really accept the "no resources to make the change" argument, as the
existing draft is broken (as acknowledged) so some change has/had to be made
anyway. Changing the schema to delete the minOccurs attribute would have not
taken any more resources than the change that was made to the stylesheet.

I realise that you are having a F2F now, and so several issues are likely to
be being decided, I'll defer a decision on whether to close or re-open this
report once the proposed resolution of all the issues is more clear.

(this open/closed business makes the discussion seem rather more adversarial
than one would like, but as I'm sure you know this is intended as constructive
reviewing rather than spanners in works...)

David

Received on Wednesday, 28 September 2005 14:47:43 UTC